![]() The internet, when it came in our teens, was welcome, exciting and fathomable, but it changed things briskly and sometimes bewilderingly. I was part of the web-straddling generation. It was like that famous shot from 2001: A Space Odyssey, when the prehistoric monkey throws a bone in the air and it turns into a spaceship. ![]() Speaking to me on the phone from the US, Winter added: "There was no ramp up. how much material was suddenly available," the technology guru John Perry Barlow tells Alex Winter, the director of Downloaded, in his new documentary. I installed the software, searched Napster's vast list of MP3 files, and soon had Soul Bossa Nova plinking kilobyte by kilobyte on to my hard drive. I was a model Napster user: internet-equipped, impatient and mostly ignorant of the ethical and legal particulars of peer-to-peer file-sharing. One day I had unsupervised access to the family PC and, for reasons forgotten, an urge to hear the campy orchestral number from the film Austin Powers. I was 17, and the owner of an irregular music collection that numbered about 20 albums, most of them a real shame ( OMC's How Bizarre, the Grease 2 soundtrack). Some way from San Mateo, in suburban London I had just become one myself. As recounted in Downloaded – a documentary soon to premiere at the SXSW film festival, telling the story of a piece of software that came and went and whipped up a new digital music industry in its slip – Napster had 20 million users at the time. ![]() ![]() Figures scrawled on a whiteboard told how many people around the world had installed their file-sharing application and were using it to download music from each other's computers. I n the first weeks of 2000 the founders of Napster were in their office above a bank in San Mateo, California, considering dizzying numbers. ![]()
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